At the end of each month the SoPD writes a post which provides an overview of some of the major pieces of Parkinson’s-related research that were made available during October 2018.

The post is divided into five parts based on the type of research (Basic biology, disease mechanism, clinical research, other news, and Review articles/videos).

So, what happened during October 2018?

In world news:

1st October – The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their discoveries in cancer therapy (Click here for the press release).

3rd October – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to George P. Smith, Frances Arnold, and Greg Winter for taking control of evolution and designing molecules used it for purposes that bring the greatest benefit to humankind (Click here to read the press release).

8th October – The 27th Human Tower Competition finished in Tarragona, Spain. ‘Castells’ were declared by Unesco one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2010. Look at the passion of these crazy Catalonians (seriously, take a moment and watch this video):

(Click here for another example – and turn the sound up to listen to the excitement in the commentator’s voice)

18th October – The auction house Christie’s announced that ‘Portrait of Edmond Belamy’ a painting generated entirely by artificial intelligence, will be sold at auction

(Yeah, I don’t understand art either)

30th October – NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft flew closer to the Sun than any other human made object, passing within 42.7 million km (26.6 million miles) from the Sun’s surface.

In the world of Parkinson’s research, a great deal of new research and news was reported:

In October 2018, there were 647 research articles added to the Pubmed website with the tag word “Parkinson’s” attached (6530 for all of 2018 so far). In addition, there was a wave to news reports regarding various other bits of Parkinson’s research activity (clinical trials, etc).

The top 6 pieces of Parkinson’s news

Continue reading “Monthly Research Review – October 2018” →

At the end of each year, it is a useful practise to review the triumphs (and failures) of the past 12 months. It is an exercise of putting everything into perspective.

2017 has been an incredible year for Parkinson’s research.

And while I appreciate that statements like that will not bring much comfort to those living with the condition, it is still important to consider and appreciate what has been achieved over the last 12 months.

In this post, we will try to provide a summary of the Parkinson’s-related research that has taken place in 2017 (Be warned: this is a VERY long post!)

The number of research reports and clinical trial studies per year since 1817

As everyone in the Parkinson’s community is aware, in 2017 we were observing the 200th anniversary of the first description of the condition by James Parkinson (1817). But what a lot of people fail to appreciate is how little research was actually done on the condition during the first 180 years of that period.

The graphs above highlight the number of Parkinson’s-related research reports published (top graph) and the number of clinical study reports published (bottom graph) during each of the last 200 years (according to the online research search engine Pubmed – as determined by searching for the term “Parkinson’s“).

PLEASE NOTE, however, that of the approximately 97,000 “Parkinson’s“-related research reports published during the last 200 years, just under 74,000 of them have been published in the last 20 years.

That means that 3/4 of all the published research on Parkinson’s has been conducted in just the last 2 decades.

And a huge chunk of that (almost 10% – 7321 publications) has been done in 2017 only.

So what happened in 2017? Continue reading “2017 – Year in Review: A good vintage” →